About
From a young age, I showed interest in my mother’s canning practices, and herb drying. She has been a large influence on my journey to self-reliance.
Fast forward to now, we have three beautiful children and our whole family is thriving. A few years ago, I felt a major calling to leave my job as a school nurse. I’m extremely thankful that I got a degree in something that I could step away from and come back to when I’m ready! We went down to a single earner household, and I had to really ramp up my frugality. I make it my mission to cut costs everywhere and each day I find something else to trim away from our spending. I am now home full-time raising my babies and homeschooling our eldest. We are more financially stable then when I was working and had two incomes, and we have managed to pay off all of our debt aside from student loans and our mortgage which we continually work towards.
Even though we are not fully debt free (yet), the freedom that comes with paying off thousands and thousands of dollars in medical, car, and credit card debt is immense and because of these major strides every aspect of our lives is better.
It is amazing what you can accomplish when you put your mind to it. It is also equally amazing to see what you can save by going back to a more basic mentality of living, which I can’t wait to show you.
My goal is to share all my frugal life habits with you, while teaching you how to cut even the smallest amount of wasteful spending from hundreds of places in your daily life. Whether you are a single or dual earner household, I can show you how to save hundreds if not thousands of dollars a year. Let’s take back our freedom and remove ourselves from the clutches of reliance on others, as we take a back-to-basics approach to self-sufficiency!
I grew up in semi-rural town in Eastern Pennsylvania, where my mother was always trying to grow something. Although we moved around a lot, my mom always tried to garden. I was introduced to canning at a young age and I spent many summers snapping, blanching, jarring and pressure canning green beans.
At the age of 24, I started working towards a nursing degree at a local community college. After seven long years I earned my bachelor’s degree in nursing and graduated at 31. Nursing school was the single hardest thing I’ve ever done. Becoming the first person in my family to graduate from college was a huge accomplishment for me.
Shortly after graduating college, my husband and I welcomed our first child into the world in 2017. Mounting debt and trying to live the American dream soon found us wondering how we could live like this for our entire lives. We were constantly trying to play catch up, always a paycheck away from being destitute. We started taking action to live a more frugal lifestyle. Our great friends had told us about Dave Ramsey a few years earlier and while we had haphazardly tried to stop accumulating debt, we weren’t doing the greatest job. We plugged into a local church that was hosting a Dave Ramsey FPU course and got serious about our future.
My Mom, doing what she loves, snapping beans.
Mom, still snapping beans.
A first-generation college graduate, and new mom.